Dissent, Public Space and the Politics of Citizenship: Riots and the ‘Outside Agitator’

Abstract

This paper presents an historical examination of a significant period in which state authority and citizenship came together around the question of dissent in the US. Drawing on congressional records, news accounts and legal documents—and deploying theories of citizenship and space—it presents an argument about how state power and geographical space came together around the question of the ‘race riots’ that swept American cities in the late 1960s. I focus in particular on how government officials and others constituted the figure of the ‘outside agitator’ as the cause of illegitimate dissent and the subject of state intervention. Such arguments about the geography of authority and dissent were themselves interventions in the politics of citizenship. More broadly, then, the paper argues for closer attention to issues of difference—and the geography of difference—in the constitution of state power.

Notes

Bruce D'Arcus, Miami University of Ohio, Department of Geography, 216 Shideler Hall, Oxford, Ohio 45056, USA. E‐mail: [email protected]. This paper was originally presented under a different title at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, in Philadelphia. Thanks to Nick Blomley and Patricia Ehrkamp, who offered helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the paper.

Ehrkamp and Leitner (2003)—for example, show how Turkish migrants in Germany negotiate complex identities of belonging and citizenship across equally complex geographical spaces and spatial relationships. In a similar vein, Secor (2001) shows how Kurdish women negotiate the identity politics of gender, ethnicity, language and religion amidst the public spaces of Istanbul and thus become actors in the dynamics of citizenship.

The association between visibility, identity and political legitimacy occurs beyond riots. Mexican military officials—for example, commented on the anonymity of masked campesinos who could not be otherwise clearly marked as Zapatistas, and thus threats to the state.

Smith (1989) observed a similar discourse of citizenship articulated by the ‘New Right’ in the 1980s.